


The Peter Pan Job

by ssleif



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, But this is abo and it's not so clear, Canon Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Gen, Hurt!Eliot, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Bigotry, Past Eliot/Aimee - Freeform, i'd say homophobia? or transphobia?, past assault, past dubcon Eliot/Moreau
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 12:13:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13341024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssleif/pseuds/ssleif
Summary: Eliot is drugged on a job, and the rest of the all-alpha Leverage team learn something unexpected.All hail the OT3, and all the ways they get together. ;)





	The Peter Pan Job

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hoosierbitch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoosierbitch/gifts).



> For hoosierbitch for the ABO exchange. Leverage was the one we overlapped on, so I did a little digging through your works and bookmarks... hopefully this will suit! Hope the new year is going well for you!
> 
> Title inspired, just a little, by having just read Peter Darling by Austin Chant. 
> 
> I'm keeping the timing on this one deliberately vague, because I couldn't make up my mind. this is either late seasons, or post-series, but I never actually say whether Nate and Sophie are /gone/ gone, or just on another job unreachable, somewhere.
> 
> Also, if you want to read the rough outline of how ABO works in this universe first, or you want a more specific idea of what kinds of gender issues and bigotry are coming in this fic, see my note at the end of the work.

The Job goes sideways.

The job goes sideways, and Elliot’s still inside. Parker and Hardison don’t even hesitate— they’re there inside an hour, taking out the security. Some crossed wires, some broken windows, and a few smashed heads later, they’re working their way down hallway after goddamn hallway of the freaking… bunker? Rat’s warren? Seriously who needs all these rooms and tunnels. They come upon another goon and parker hits him, smashes his nose in, while Hardison tases his buddy. Her taser finally gives up the ghost, out of juice, but that’s okay, because they can fight.

They can fight, because Elliot taught them how. It’s almost embarrassing, and maybe would be embarrassing to a more conformist bunch, but they really had been uniquely unskilled and unsuited to physical defense, for an all-alpha group of criminals. Sure, Nate had thrown a few punches in his time, and Parker and Sophie were both in peak physical shape and took no shit… but still. They were the most unlikely bunch of alphas to ever convene… but they balanced each other. Even When Nate and Sophie weren’t there (maybe especially when Nate and Sophie weren’t there), they still balanced so well.

And they’d all learned parts of what the other two did, over the years. Hardison may not have been as traditionally dominant as most alphas, but he still protected and provided for what was his, be it monetarily, or though fancy finger work and digital back doors. Part of that, included giving them enough skills to get by in a pinch, hence the real reason Elliot had gone in undercover, with juuust enough tech know-how to get into to their system and find and upload their security tapes onto the website Hardison had built.

Parker hadn’t much cared for gender, before meeting them. But working with Sophie had shown her _how_  she could be, if she wanted to, and the boys had made her _want to_ , if only sometimes. It was like having the most priceless and beautiful things she’d ever stolen, only to realize they’d stolen her right back. But she knew how to take care of her things, and so she’d hooked Eliot up with a harness and lines. He _should_  have come rappelling down the side of the building, past the security cam Hardison had been looping all night, and run off into the woods where parker was waiting, eventually, with the van.

Only he didn’t.

The video files popped up, but Elliot didn’t.

So now they’re here, smashing the plan to pieces, absolutely not about to be stopped.

They hear crashing, and grunting, and the sound of… probably Elliot, doing what he did so well, so much better than any other alpha, even other military alphas, ever seemed to.

They turn the next corner just as a door slams open and Elliot tumbles out. Elliot hitting the ground isn’t strange… but then he doesn’t get up, just rolls a little, and groans. They break into a run, Hardison dropping (probably painfully) to his knees to check Elliot, Parker putting her back to them, looking for more trouble.

But there isn’t any. All, parker counts… seven?, of Eliot’s opponents are down for the count. She quietly shuts the door, picks the lock closed, and uses her now-dead taser (which she’d already palmed back from Hardison) to smash the handle, hopefully creating a challenge, at least for a little while.

When she turns back, Hardison is pulling Eliot to his feet… but he doesn’t look good. He’s not bleeding, that she can see, but he seems dizzy, disoriented, and worryingly quiet. She meets Hardison’s eyes, and they waste no time.

She doesn’t know if he’s concussed, or poisoned, or sick, but all three of those require a medical professional who is definitely not in this building. The further they go, the more Elliot sags, until Hardison is almost carrying him across the grass and into the back of the van.

Elliot tries to focus, it looks like, once in the van, squinting to see her and slurring something that might have been “good now?”. She climbs in, props him up against the side of the van, pulls his legs in, and closes the doors. She pins him with her own weight, as Hardison turns the engine over, and starts to pull away.

“Yeah, we’re good.” She confirms, and he slumps, the last of the fight apparently going out of him.

It’s not true though, she thinks, something’s wrong. Eliot isn’t injured quite like she’s ever seen. He’s sweaty, but not sick. Dizzy, but no head wound. And he smells…

No. That can’t be right.

Inside the building, she’d caught the scent, but assumed it belonged to one of the people Eliot had fought. But here, in the finite space of the back of the van, it was unmistakable, even if she’d never smelled this exact strain before.

It was a heat. An omega in heat.

Eliot.

 _Eliot_  smelled like…

Was Eliot an Omega?

 

 

Eliot knows something’s wrong, but he also knows it’s okay. Something happened, they got him with something, drugged him, and so, unusually, his body is betraying him. But his team is there, so that’s okay. It’s okay, when he’s with them, if he’s not okay. They let him be that. He clings to coherency, to balance, long enough to get to their arms, and then to their van. Once that door closes, he knows his part is done, and they will have the next move taken care of.

So he lets go. He slumps over, and drifts.

He dreams.

He dreams Kentucky, and he dreams Aimee.

He’s 17, and they’re kissing in an alley, and he’s got her pinned against the brick. It’s thrilling and transgressive and perfect. He’s hot all over, and he’s pretty sure she is too. He knows they need to take this somewhere else. Even if they’re not _really_  gonna do anything, well, anything more than making out and heavy petting, probably… This is still the wrong place— anyone could walk up on them and see. See him. See her letting him…

Someone does.

Elliot dreams the slurs, the taunts, the gloating of punk assholes who have to ruin things to feel good. He goes cold, and then hot: terrified, and then furious. He lets her go, but she holds on, telling him not to, telling him to let it go.

They laugh and jeer, tell her to keep her pet on its leash, if she doesn’t want it hurt.

He turns.

He dreams the fight, dreams Her suddenly gone. In the diner behind them? He feels the impact, tastes dirt, shoves himself back up, takes a swing.

Through the barrage on his body, the crazy shifting landscape in his head, he hears them still mocking, still fixated on a couple of Femmes screwing each other, and the natural order. What he needs, they tell him as they beat him, as he fights the four of them, as best he can, is a real man, a real alpha, to show him his place. Not some stupid bitch beta. He spits blood in someone’s face, and the guy stumbles back, disgusted.

He dreams the moment when two of them held on, while another one went for his pants, and the flash of sick fear that went through him, fear he didn’t know he could still feel, until the asshole came up with a knife. A dirty hand grabs him by his long long hair. A dirty mouth declares that, now, everyone will look at him and see what a freak he is, what a pervert of an omega. Only good omegas have nice hair like that. If he’s not an omega, then what does he need with it?

He dreams the bat that comes out of nowhere, the feel of his foot sinking into someone’s soft stomach, the way the world tilted again as hey dropped him. The stalemate. The moment they break and take off. They don’t run. Why would they run from some weak female beta and her freak? They kept their knife, but they left the hair they cut.

She pulls him to his feet, and guides him into the diner. She stations him on the closed toilet in the bathroom, says she’s going to find some clean kitchen towels. Touches his face, and leaves.

It’s not usual, he knows, and he feels sicker than he did outside. He catches sight of himself in the mirror, half his hair in uneven chunks, his true colors apparently showing through. He can’t sit there.

He dreams the moment right before, standing in the office, her standing in the door, him catching his reflection in the window, just enough. He can see it, the moment she thinks about telling him not to, /ordering/ him not to, as he fists his left hand in what remains of his hair, palms the scissors with his right.

And then his hair is all over the floor, and she looks as sad as she looks angry. He reaches for her, a moment of softness he hates himself for— but she jerks away, slamming the door.

He dreams the fight with his father later, knowing that it’s the end.

The fight he and his father have is loud. Loud enough that the whole town will know by morning, since the neighbors could hear everything.

His father wants to fix things, wants everything to go back to being okay. Wants Elliot to clean up and apologize, and for god’s sake go see a hairdresser and get something done with his hair. His father wants the pendulum to swing back, but Elliot suddenly can’t swing back.

It’s sudden and not, the weights of years of knowing he didn’t fit crashing into the knowledge that he /doesn’t want to/. And he knows he’s not a pendulum. He’s pound cake overflowing its pan, and he’s evaporated milk when you thought you bought sweetened Condensed. He’s the stone you tried to skip, but it was the wrong shape and it sank and got carried away in some unseen current.

He’s done.

He packs, and yells back, and heads out the door, trying not t think about the shock and fury on his father’s face.

He steps into a barber shop that afternoon, and asks them to do something about his hair.

They buzz it off.

He’s in a recruiter’s office by that evening.

And then it’s done.

He dreams the relief, the hope. He dreams the knowledge that, even though there are things he will have to hide, lengths he will have to go to to protect himself.. He’ll get to be /himself/.

He dreams the first true optimism he’d felt since they day he learned what it was that omegas were supposed to be.

 

  
They do some digging, and they don’t take Eliot to the hospital. Instead, the get him cleaned up, and into a bed. He’s mostly out of it, but he drinks water when they tell him to, and he lets them take his temperature, and he’s a scarily good patient until he starts to overheat. They put the fan on for him, and give him some ice, and retreat to the living room.

He’s an Omega.

Eliot’s an Omega.

“How did we not know this?!” Hardison waves his arms for emphasis.

“I don’t know.” Parker is very very uncertain. “He’s in heat.”

“I know! What do we do!?!”

Parker shrugs.

The idea of taking him to a hospital, of letting strangers poke and prod and ask why his papers say he’s an alpha… Whatever is going on, the fact that he can go into heat is clearly something he’s worked very hard to keep private.

But at the same time, no amount of privacy is worth his health.

Hardison reads online that if an omega suddenly has a heat after suppressing them for a long time, sometimes they can spike fevers up to 104. It’s not exactly safe, but it’s not unusual. They decide that they will not take him to the hospital, unless it gets that bad.

Be he Alpha or Omega or Pretzel, he's theirs. And they take care of their own.

 

 

Elliot dreams. He dreams about fatigues and guns, and training and secrets. He dreams about feeling good, but also feeling scared. He keeps his hair short, and takes suppressants, and builds his body stronger.

He dreams about disillusionment, the knowledge that he doesn’t quite fit here either. Frustration with people, with bureaucracy, with people using him like a pawn or a toy.

He dreams about no-win situations and big-shots washing their hands of the fallout.

He dreams about going freelance, going where he wants, taking the jobs he wants in the places he wants, and getting paid beautifully to do it. He’s still not happy, but he’s getting less scared. He has a reputation. He likes his reputation.

He dreams about a job offer.

Moreau.

 

 

They check on him periodically. They aren’t even tempted by the pheromones he’s pumping out, so upset over how distressed he clearly is. He tosses and turns, never really wakes, but he’ll drink if they put a glass to his mouth, and he seems to calm sometimes, if one of them comes in with a washcloth and wipes down his face and neck.

They take turns taking his temp. It’s high, and fluctuating, but slowly climbing towards the benchmark, 101.5, 102.5, 103, 103.5. Hardison and Parker are strong, but it’s still a struggle to pull their largely-muscle partner back down the hall into the bathroom. They run a cool bath and wash him down again, resolutely ignoring the intimate details, how aroused he is, how wet he is. They make him drink again, dry him off, get him in clean clothes and clean sheets. He hits 104, but comes back down a little. IN the early hours of the morning, they crawl into bed with him, not touching him, except for when he thrashes or bucks hard enough to be an issue. They are trying not to make him any warmer than he already is, but hoping that maybe their combined scents will help.

 

 

Eliot dreams of Moreau.

He dreams the early jobs first, feeling competent and wanted, knowing this alpha valued him not for some hand of biology he was dealt, but because of what he’d built himself into. When Moreau let them take their relationship physical, Eliot thrilled at first, pleased to be making the first move, pleased to be in a relationship that truly felt like alphas on par, two people, equal in gender and status and skill, even if their skill sets differed.

And then his pills were gone.

Eliot whined, and shied away from that line, shied away from all of it. He felt the weight of those days pressing down on him, trapped in the jobs, that were going so wrong, and trapped in his body that didn’t belong to him anymore, and trapped under Moreau.

He thrashed and whined, and somewhere, distantly, felt hands on his face, on his shoulders, shaking and pulling him away from the hot-pain-suffocation-desperation-desolation of the dream.

Something cool touched his face, and he swallowed the water in his mouth, and when he drifted again, it was easier.

He dreamed the first time he’d touched a gun, after it was all over, the sick guilt of it. He went to the range and fired round after round, weapon after weapon, until his guts stopped twisting. And then he stopped using guns.

He dreamed looking at himself shirtless in a mirror, seeing the lurid pink-purple scar, wanting to smash it, smash everything. So he went to the gym and he went out running, and he traveled and he traveled until his skin stopped crawling and felt like his again.

He took some small jobs, and then some larger jobs, checking and double-checking, making sure he knew everything he needed to know. Making sure he’d never be surprised. He didn’t do repeat jobs. Employers were strictly one-hit-per.

He dreamed styling his own hair, and feeling the tips of phantom fingers scratching through the short hairs at his neck. So he shrugged, and let himself stop using the clippers. Remembered that he _liked_  the feeling of running his own fingers through his hair, liked the security of a tie holding it all back from his face. Liked _bandannas_. He learned to cook, and how to be around people again, at least a little bit. He learned _himself_  again.

He dreamed the Bering Airspace job, and feeling out the edges of these people, and standing in a circle, just knowing in his gut that he’d found it. His place.

He dreams the moment he knew he would gladly die for them. He dreams watching Hardison and Parker getting closer, and the feeling of being so happy for them, and just a little bit envious. He dreams making the decision to not rock the boat, to not say anything about his own feelings, and _definitely_  not about his history. Five arrogant Alphas should never have worked on paper, and yet they all did. So very well.

He dreamed looking at Parker and Hardison, silently promising himself that he would do what ever the universe wanted from him in order to keep them the best they could be. He was so happy with them, it felt like greed to look for anything else.

And when he opened his eyes, they were there.

 

**Author's Note:**

> First: ABO biology. I often think, in ABO, of male/female being the "secondary" gender, the more phenotypical gender, really only relevant in betas, while the "sex" that "matters" is ABO. i.e. Most Alphas have testes (and probably knots, or they go into rut, or something), most Omegas have ovaries (and go into heat), and betas are defined primarily by the /lack/ of mating cycles and that the form that their genetic material takes tends to be defined by the "secondary" male/female characteristic. Added to that, especially in "tradition" and "conservative" environments, Alpha/Omega is seen as the ideal pairing, followed by "any pairing that presumably creates children". So alpha/beta, beta/beta, and beta/omega pairings are all fine, although non "reproductive" pairs, ie female beta/omega or alpha/male beta, are still considered a little scandalous in some circles. Not as "bad" as outright homosexuality (alpha/alpha or omega/omega), but more akin to a couple of atheists who want dogs and no children moving into a religious town might be. (though of course, just as in the real world, adoption and surrogacy are totally options for couples or moresomes that can't or don't want to have "their own" kids, but want kids anyway) The quiet disapproval of Female beta/omega pairings is part of what inspires the fight in the alley, but even more than that, is the way they were behaving. Omegas are still often assumed and expected to be the more submissive partner, and in non"reproductive" couples, that's expected even moreso, as if to prove that the couple is just as gender normative as anyone else, even despite their biology. So the idea of an angry non-submissive Omega, taking the active, pursuing dominant role in a non-conforming relationship just paints an even bigger target on their backs. 
> 
> Additionally, I think polyamory is more common, and more commonly accepted, than it is for us. There was probably a time where fancy households had Alpha heads with multiple omega spouses, especially... and I bet there was a history of betas being considered a little more second class (I mean, omegas were probably /valuable/, but treated like objects).
> 
> So then this fic. 
> 
> I wasn't sure how binary I wanted Elliot to be. On the one hand, I was definitely approaching his experience as a trans experience, but on the other hand we're dealing with fictional biology and I don't want to conflate things. In my experience, being trans tends to manifest itself most often on both a social/societal role level, and a more physical/biological level, and Eliot in this universe has struggled with both.
> 
> But the neverending issue when it comes to trans stuff, especially as a more enby person myself... is how trans is "enough"? Trans folks can put themselves in terribly toxic boxes, sometimes, in an effort to "pass", eschewing certain colors and styles and language and things, trying desperately to feel valid and be safe. I think, in the context of this story, Eliot probably did that, when he joined up. Ran as far away from what he had been as he could. But the healthiest trans guys I know (hell, the healthiest people), did that, and then eased off. I like to think that that's where Eliot went. That after his time in the Military, and freelance, and for Moreau, he finally got to a place where he was cool with himself, and also confident that he could deal, if anyone else had a problem with him. And being okay in his skin, wanting to grow his hair out, being fine with a pair of Alphas looking out for him sometimes... those things don't make him less alpha. Less trans. 
> 
> I left it where it was, though, because I wasn't quite ready to turn it into a trans!Eliot Manifesto. XD
> 
> Also also, i have some ideas about just what Exactly Eliot did for Moreau, and what Moreau did to him, but it's all a little body horror for my tastes. So I'm leaving that here as well. I think Moreau was absolutely thrilling when he realised Eliot had been born omega and was making that with drugs. Moreau likes power, and there's a lot of power in that secret. I also think Moreau was only really interested in Eliot, in having Eliot in his bed, once he had that leverage. Even if Eliot didn't know he had it. The idea of bringing the other Alpha down, maybe even the fantasy of /impregnating/ him? That's probably what got Moreau going, got him doing his best to make Eliot into his perfectly obedient attack dog.
> 
> Also also, I think Eliot can't have kids and he's not exactly... sad about it? As a teenager and young man, the thought of it always made him super dysphoric, I think, even when he didn't understand what was going on. But he's sad for the /choice/, I think. I haven't decided exactly what went down, but I think it's all tied up in the end of his time with Moreau, and maybe with some of the worst jobs he pulled for him.
> 
> So on that note, I hope it works for you at least a little. Thanks for reading!


End file.
